App Store Optimizer (ASO) Question:

There are 4 places in an app’s listing that will determine whether it is eligible to rank for keywords:

☛ App name
☛ App keywords space
☛ Developer name
☛ App in app purchases (exact match only)
Apple has also been evolving its algorithm to rank apps for keywords not necessarily found in an app’s listing, such as:

Partial keyword matches (e.g. ranking “Spotify music app” for “music player app”)
Competitor names (e.g. ranking Spotify for Pandora)
Common category or other contextual keywords (e.g. ranking Spotify for music-related searches)
Additionally, if a keyword is removed from your app listing (e.g. keywords space), you typically will become immediately ineligible to rank for that keyword.